Brazil to decide on World Bank head after BRICS consensus

Country awaiting consensus with emerging powers before deciding whom to support:

Brazil: Brazil on Thursday praised the US candidate for the World Bank presidency but said it was awaiting a consensus with fellow members of the BRICS bloc of emerging powers before deciding whom to support.

Finance Minister Guido Mantega met with Korean-American Jim Yong Kim, Washington's choice to succeed Robert Zoellick as World Bank chief, and said that the selection must be made based on merit and not on nationality.

Kim, a public health expert and president of Dartmouth College, is competing with Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former finance minister of Colombia.

“The nationality of the candidate is irrelevant.

What matters is being qualified and committed to reform the institution to make it more representative, with more quotas and a greater voice for emerging countries,” Mantega told reporters after the meeting.

He said that he and Kim also shared the view that the World Bank must be reformed to give greater representation to emerging powers.

Kim, he added, “is a man familiar with the issues relating to poor and less developed emerging countries. We have no doubt that he has good experience.”

But Mantega said Brazil, Latin America and now the world's sixth largest economy, has yet to make up its mind on the contest.

“We have not yet spoken with the other candidates and we are working to define a joint position by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),” the minister said. Kim is on a world tour seeking to drum up support from major emerging economies.

He was in China last weekend and plans to visit India and Mexico among other stops.

Under a tacit agreement, the United States picks the World Bank president, always an American, and Europe puts a European at the helm of the International Monetary Fund, the Bank's sister institution. But BRICS and other emerging powers say it is high time to end the practice.

The World Bank, which was founded in 1944, plans to select the successor to Zoellick, the outgoing president by April 20, the start of its spring meetings with the IMF. AFP